When Paterson police arrived at a Mill Street apartment in response to a mental health emergency earlier this month, body-camera recordings show their interactions with Najee Seabrooks — who had locked himself in the bathroom with several weapons — were cordial and calm.
“Let’s just give him some space and try and handle it the best way we can,” a patrol officer said.
But by the time a trained police negotiator arrived, nearly two hours later, the apartment was filled with officers with helmets, shields and other protective gear, the video shows. The police had confirmed that Seabrooks, 31, had several kitchen knives and they were positioning themselves for a better view — or possibly a shot — into the bathroom.
The standoff continued to escalate. Seabrooks broke fixtures or pipes, creating a minor flood and lit what appeared to be clothing on fire, as officers became increasingly aggressive. At 12:35 p.m. Seabrooks emerged with a knife, according to the state attorney general’s office, and officers yelled “drop it” several times before shooting him. Officers can then be heard reassuring each other — “Everybody good? We all good?” — before alerting the emergency medical team that Seabrooks needed to be taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead 15 minutes later.
Demands for change
Since the shooting on March 3, Seabrooks’ family, friends and colleagues have called for changes to what they characterize as a heavy-handed response from the Paterson police, with rallies in the city, outrage expressed at public meetings and protests online. Their frustration is exacerbated by the fact that Seabrooks was himself trained in violence prevention as a member of the Paterson Healing Collective, which had representatives on-site the morning of the shooting who were prevented from speaking directly with their co-worker by police.
Video of the fatal encounter between Paterson police and Najee Seabrooks
The arrival of police can be especially intimidating to people of color, experts note, given the long history of racist law enforcement actions in this country that continue today, repeating the trauma for Black, Hispanic and other minority communities.
“The moment you include police, it’s a life-or-death situation for us,” said Bre Azanedo, a leader of Black Lives Matter Paterson, who is Black and Latina. Seabrooks’ family is also Black.
‘This incident does not display, or it doesn’t give me any confidence that the training was … efficient for matters such as mental health crises.’ — Jason Williams, associate professor of justice studies, Montclair State University
Azanedo, who worked with Seabrooks, said it has been hard for her to watch the video recordings. She noticed while the initial officers to respond treated Seabrooks with kindness — calling him “love” and offering him water — the tone changed when the SWAT team showed up hours later. “The hostility, they created that,” she said.
The shooting death is also raising question about “use-of-force” training among police, as well as initiatives to involve mental health professionals in the response, like New Jersey’s ARRIVE Together program, which the state is seeking to expand. In late 2020, then-Attorney General Gurbir Grewal revised the state’s use-of-force policy to prohibit all forms of physical force except as a last resort and only after an officer attempts to de-escalate the situation.
“I think the entire interaction is indicative of the incompetence of the Paterson Police Department, even if they may have had training,” said Jason Williams, an associate professor of justice studies at Montclair State University. “This incident does not display, or it doesn’t give me any confidence that the training was, again, efficient for matters such as mental health crises.”
Legacy of police-involved killings
The attorney general’s office is investigating the incident, as it does all police-involved shootings in New Jersey. Since 2019, encounters with police have killed at least 46 people in the state, with eight of those deaths in Paterson — the highest number of any municipality, according to an analysis of available data by NJ Spotlight News. A half dozen of these deaths involved shootings by local police, a county sheriff or a U.S. marshal, while two were people in police custody.
‘An officer showing up to someone with a mental health crisis, that’s a militarized response to a medical situation.’ — Yannick Wood, New Jersey Institute for Social Justice
By the end of 2021 all officers were required to complete training in the state’s new policy and learn a de-escalation technique designed to help people experiencing a mental health crisis. All 400-plus uniformed members of the Paterson Police Department completed training in the new policy, according to Lt. Ronald Van Wolde, the department’s training division commander, something he said is repeated twice a year. Most have also taken courses on the de-escalation technique, called Integrated Communication and Tactics (ICAT) — save a few who have been on leave — and nearly six dozen have gone through additional crisis-intervention training.
The training level of the officers involved in the Seabrooks shooting is not clear.
Some experts questioned the efficacy of these training sessions, in light of what happened to Seabrooks, who was harming himself with a knife, losing blood and appeared to be losing consciousness hours into the standoff.
New model needed
Williams and others have said it’s time for a new response model for individuals who are experiencing a mental health crisis, like Seabrooks was. “Part of the training that we give to law enforcement is hyper-militant and sometimes when they’re in these types of circumstances where things are sort of fast paced, fast moving, they adopt that mindset, the sort of militant mindset, where it’s all about them and the need to subdue the target,” Williams said.
“And so they’re not necessarily thinking through the situation with care,” Williams added. “But again, I’m not sure if we should expect this from our police forces when we really don’t train them to practice policing with a therapeutic lens and care.”
Seabrooks’ death at the hands of the police who were called to help him, advocates and experts say, highlights the stark point that those officers are not mental health professionals.
“When mental health professionals are engaging people in crises, they are specifically trained in how to speak to somebody, and in the volume with how to speak to them, the types of movements they should or should not exhibit around people who are in profound crises,” said Yannick Wood, the director of the criminal justice reform program at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice.
“We count on officers to do so many different things and we can’t expect officers to be able to do that correctly. An officer showing up to someone with a mental health crisis, that’s a militarized response to a medical situation.”
[Editor’s note: The story has been updated to remove reference to Seabrook having a gun in the encounter. Police have not confirmed Seabrook had a gun.]
